Who will work in the West’s future company
towns?

One day last summer, I
gave directions to two young Asian women on bicycles who were
looking for the grocery store. Further chatting revealed that they
weren’t tourists. In scattershot English, they told me that
they were from Thailand and had come to Cody, Wyo., on temporary
work visas to serve up hamburgers in Wendy’s, the fast-food
franchise. As they smilingly pedaled away, I called after them:
“Welcome to Cody!”

Around the same time, I
spied a newspaper story about two male Romanian college students
spending the summer cooking in a Cody restaurant. I also noticed
that Buffalo Bill’s Irma Hotel employed four college-age
women from Russia. Indeed, a trip to the concession centers in
Yellowstone National Park is to hear a cacophony of Nabokovian and
Naipaulese English accents. And the Mexicans? No matter your views
on the incendiary immigration issue, it’s a cliché to
say that they are everywhere.

I’ve been in the Cody
labor force for 14 years. At my first job, as a waiter at the Irma
Hotel, I saw two cooks fired on the same day. Other staff, tired of
management conflicts, quit and walked out the door on a regular
basis. Across the Cody service economy, people were often fired on
the spot for trivial reasons. Cody was -- and still is -- a summer
tourist town in a right-to-work state. But is it starting to
change?

The numbers are in: Wyoming grew by 2 percent in
2006-’07, which currently makes it America’s ninth
fastest-growing state. According to the Casper Star-Tribune, our
population reached 522,830 this past July, up from 512,757 the year
before, for a jump of 10,000. This growth reflects a curious
combination: a booming energy industry that attracts out-of-state
workers, and the surge of upscale newcomers flooding the state, the
latter a microcosm of the greatest demographic change in the
200-year history of the American West. These mostly baby-boomer
newcomers aren’t waiters, dishwashers or hotel room cleaners.

In 1994, the Cody business community could count on a
seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Summertime Cody was
full of lively and ambitious high school and college kids. The
updated daily list at the state job service office showed about 20
jobs, even in summer. Today, it is about 80 in midwinter, and up to
200 in summer -- 200 jobs that nobody wants. The service economy
has expanded greatly in 14 years. In 1994, McDonald’s was
Cody’s only fast-food restaurant; now there are a dozen. We
have a chronically understaffed Wal-Mart Super Center. A Walgreens
store will be under construction downtown this spring. But who will
work there?

There are upsides to the employment crunch:
It’s harder to get fired, and the increasingly desperate
business community has to keep raising wages and incentives. You
won’t find many local young people at Wendy’s, though.
These cell-phone-toting, skateboarding high school and college kids
are so prosperous -- thanks to mom and dad -- many don’t need
-- or want -- to work at all.

Fourteen years ago, a
reasonable rental housing market provided homes for the service
economy folks. No more. As trophy homes rise in the surrounding
countryside, Cody itself is gentrifying, and $300 apartments now
rent for twice that. Houses that once rented for $500 are now
$1,000, even $1,200. Utility costs (the “city bill” in
Cody parlance) continue to rise like anywhere else. Throw in $3
gasoline and inflation at the grocery store, and the rising wages
don’t come close to covering basic expenses.

It’s interesting to note that some businesses, especially
hotels and restaurants, in nearby Jackson, Wyo., and Red Lodge,
Mont., have begun to acquire local housing to rent to their
employees. Cody’s noted dude-ranch industry has always
operated on the “room and board” model, but now the
idea is coming downtown, so to speak. This company-town model
isn’t a solution specific to the Greater Yellowstone region,
of course. Ski towns in the Rockies have long known that they need
to provide as much worker housing as possible.

But
here’s what I see happening: Many of the people working
multiple jobs -- wherever they come from -- will be forced to leave
town, maybe choosing such unlikely places as Worland, Greybull or
Lovell. As for the business sector, it will “howl like
gutshot panthers,” as our colorful favorite son Alan Simpson
might put it, while asking themselves: “Who will work?”

Bill Croke is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He writes and
toils in Cody, Wyoming.

More from Communities

The whole country is behind the 8 ball so to
speak on paying the supposed lower tier workers, who actually serve
everyone.

Eventually and over
time, that job status changes to higher pay or NO
workers. That simple.

What it
amounts to, is the Middle Class in the USA is about gone
now.

Upper tiers will either raise pay towards
the lower tiers ( the supposed trickle down theory) OR more likely
keep the whole system in the current mode of regmentized
economics ( rule and legal quandry too ) thus the lower
tiers are very victimized by that and find it tough to
move up. That puts quite a few who and end up living ( existing
) in company or community town housing deals and maybe
even working for less cash.

Basically
we're now at the "China Syndrome"
juncture of "trickle down" economics, ie years of
govt favors to the preferreds ( Housed workers are just another
consequence of that).

The USA has not
practiced "Flow Up" economics for
approx. 40 years. It's doubtfull they'll
ever come up with the legislative talent to even
recognize what that is anymore, much less come up with a fair deal
for all enacting such.

Anonymous

Feb 21, 2008 04:24 PM

There was a time when Cody was considered a
great place to live and easy on the wallet -- "the best
kept secret around." Sounds like the secret has gotten
out.

Anonymous

Feb 25, 2008 05:42 PM

You mentioned ski towns as places that are seeing this
phenomenon first-hand- I can attest to that. Summit County,
Colorado's housing market is outrageously expensive
compared to neighbouring Park and Lake County's. The county
government over there is currently buying/building so-called
'affordable' housing, but it is expected to fill
only a tiny fraction of the demand that exists. With the highways
being clogged with commuters from those two counties, upscale
residents complain about the traffic but oppose
'affordable' housing on the grounds that people
need to stop whining and sacrifice to be able to afford a home.
What the gentrified newcomers don't seem to understand (and
this seems to be a common refrain in other mountain communities as
well) is that the housing market is so skewed toward the higher end
that it isn't possible to scrimp and save and buy or rent a
home in those communities. In Leadville, I pay less on my mortgage
for a three-bedroom house than most people in Summit County pay for
rent on a studio apartment! The artificially inflated housing
values in resort communities will, I think, eventually lead to
stratified areas in which only the rich live, while the rest of us
who 'serve' them will be forced to commute longer
and longer distances to our jobs. An extreme view of this theory
could run to the point that these gentrified communities will be
vacant for more than half the year.

Anonymous

Mar 03, 2008 12:09 PM

Thanks for reading: Seems this
piece tells us a Lot more about Bill C., than about problems in
Cody. Why? He seems obsessed with
"wealthy" people. Quoting; "
Upscale newcomers flooding the state" (
A 2% growth, some of them being "Upscale", hardly
seems a flood?), and, "high school and
college kids are so prosperous -----".
Just a guess, but mine is that Bill's Socialist flag is
peeping over the horizon? Thanks again. Jim
Sullivan